The present application is related to printing technologies including but not being limited to xerographic printers, and more particularly to the diagnosing of issues related to the image quality (IQ) of documents produced by the xerographic and/or other printing technologies.
Presently, one manner in which image quality issues are identified is through a subjective review of a document by the user who generated the document. For example, the user may believe image quality issues exist such as streaking, inappropriate lightness, inappropriate darkness, and color bleeding, among other issues. Once a user perceives such image quality issues they will commonly contact the company which services the printer, such as by phone, email, or other communication channel. During this contact the user will attempt to explain the image quality issue. However, often such an interaction does not result in sufficient information for the servicing company to determine exactly what is causing the image quality issue, the degree of the image quality issue, and/or the manner in which to most effectively address the issue. Therefore, the servicing company will need to send a technician to visit the user's facility, to perform diagnostic testing on the printer.
It is not uncommon that an additional visit by the technician will be required. For example, the first visit may simply result in the identification of the problem, then, it might be necessary to obtain a part in order to address the problem. Alternatively, the technician may find there are in fact no image quality issues related to the printer, but rather a user has misinterpreted the document to have an image quality problem, as it is known that to a certain degree image quality issues are subjective.
Another process by which image quality issues are identified is through an automatic triggering of an alarm or alert by the printer itself. These alarms or alerts may be local such as a visual notification on a display screen of the printer. These alarms or alerts may also be forwarded to the servicing company via a communication channel, such as a phone network, the internet, etc.
In any of the above scenarios, significant costs are involved including the dispatching of a technician to the user's site. Particularly, if one were to view the steps involved in addressing image quality issues as a continuum of costs (including both costs in time and money) the most effective solution is one achieved by the user themselves at the printer. Almost as desirable is to have the solution generated by an in-house “expert” within the user's organization who is already at the facility. Thereafter, more expensive in time and costs would be a solution found by a helpdesk responding to a query from someone within the organization implemented by a user at the facility. A yet more expensive solution is having a technician from the servicing company visit the facilities of the user. Even further additional costs are incurred when the technician must make multiple trips to the location, and even more costly, would be the need to bring in a specialist technician.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and/or method, which is at the lower end of the described continuum.